Doctor Who

[evensgrey]

Yes, I agree that the pacing wasn't so great.  It also had rather too many characters.  (The woman who was the rival media presence, who seems to have been introduced solely so they could have the shot of her eye looking around in the crushed car, for instance.)

[spoiler]
Does anyone agree that The Blessing pretty much HAS to be Time Lord technology?  It seems to fit the bill as the way that they influenced something physically like them to evolve.
[/spoiler]

[MrBogosity]

[spoiler]Sounds more like ancient technology to me--the Eternals, maybe, or the Guardians.[/spoiler]

[evensgrey]

[spoiler]Sounds more like ancient technology to me--the Eternals, maybe, or the Guardians.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]
The problem with those as candidates for creating The Blessing is that they've never been shown to have any specific interest in Earth, humans, or the kind of meddling that it appears to be set up to do.

The only entity previously shown to have an interest in such meddling is the Fendahl, which had an entirely different mechanism for doing so.

According to The Doctor, the Time Lords were engaging in precisely this kind of meddling all over the universe.  (It does also provide a nice explanation for why humanoids are so common in the Whoniverse, including species that originate in different biospheres millions of years apart and can still interbreed.)
[/spoiler]

[FSBlueApocalypse]

The Time Lords never really were meddlers. In fact, I distinctly remember them being mentioned as abunch of "Old Senators who sat around and watched."

That was part of the reason why Time Lords like The Doctor and The Master were so unique.

[evensgrey]

The Time Lords were meddlers originally.  It was the complete disaster of their meddling with the Minyans that turned them from pacifists to full-blown isolationists.

(Incidentally, that serial also creates a snag in the new series.  River is apparently wrong about The Doctor flying the TARDIS with the parking brake on in error.  The Minyans recognized the landing sound of the TARDIS as the landing sound of a TARDIS, so the Time Lords have always landed that way.  Perhaps they SHOULDN'T have, but they did.)

[MrBogosity]

River was joking. She landed the TARDIS in stealth mode, as the Doctor did later in The Impossible Astronaut.

[evensgrey]

In any case, Time Lords were described as having been quite willing to meddle early in their history, before they caused a lot of harm by screwing things up.

[FSBlueApocalypse]

Hmm. That BBC America casting call is looking more suspicious

Steven Moffat announces "The final days of the Ponds are coming during the next series. Then the Doctor will meet a new friend"

https://www.facebook.com/DoctorWho/posts/343082962372404

[FSBlueApocalypse]

So who else is excited for the Christmas special? I loved last year's episode, though apparently I'm in the minority on that.

[MrBogosity]

The title makes me cringe a bit, but I like the previews.

[Virgil0211]

Just thought I'd ask some of the more learned whovians about this, but I was thinking the other day about my old crossover idea (Borg assimilating Dalek/Time Lord technology) and I was wondering if there were any parallels in the whoniverse to the Borg, specifically their 'adaptation' element where they adapt to and adopt/repurpose new technologies they encounter. Typically, when one compares the Borg to a race in the whoniverse, they're compared to the Cybermen. However, while the Cybermen are similar in the 'convert the local inhabitants and overwhelm by swarming' element, they seem to be driven to standardize others to their specifications rather than adopt newer technologies. In this manner, the Daleks, albeit powerful, are the opposite of the borg. So, I guess I'm asking, is there a race in the whoniverse that shares this trait with the borg?

[MrBogosity]

In this manner, the Daleks, albeit powerful, are the opposite of the borg. So, I guess I'm asking, is there a race in the whoniverse that shares this trait with the borg?

No, we saw the Daleks do this: in The Chase, they apparently stole a Time Lord time capsule and this was probably how they eventually learned time travel. In Planet of the Daleks, the Daleks had developed a hover platform allowing them to move vertically for the first time. It's true that their delusions of superiority led to stagnation as well as a stalemate in the Movellan War, but thanks to Davros they were able to gain the ability to adapt (although this led to the Dalek Civil War, with the upgraded Daleks fighting the traditional Daleks who thought that the upgraded ones weren't pure Dalek, and were therefore inferior--guess who won). So they finally get the hover technology built-in in Remembrance of the Daleks, which of course was demonstrated in Dalek and pretty much every Dalek story since then. And of course there was the latest upgrade in Victory of the Daleks.

[evensgrey]

However the Daleks got their time travel technology in The Chase, the evidently lost it (or never had it, or didn't have it yet) for Remembrance of the Daleks, since one of the reasons they wanted the Hand of Omega was to transform a star into a suitable power source to replicate the experiments that led to Time Lord time travel technology (and didn't end of getting it, of course).  (One idea floating around is that the influence The Doctor had on long-term Dalek development in Genesis of the Daleks resulted in their being a completely different Dalek history, in which the were actually much less of a threat, mostly due to Davros, who actually kinda sucks at being an evil mastermind, having a much greater role in that history.)

Daleks have been shown using different forms of time travel (as have a few other races), all much cruder than TARDIS technology.

As far as assimilating technology in a manner like the Borg, there really don't seem to be any groups that do that, at least that have been shown.  Lots of races will scavenge technology (particularly humans), but nobody has been shown as going out and looking for technology to grab.  There are at least four races that could, but two are more interested in fighting each other than looking for other people's tech (the Sontarans and Rutans, both of whom have extremely high technology already), the Daleks (who are more interested in killing every other living thing in the universe, and have almost the best technology anyway) and the Time Lords, who are the most insular people in the known universe and already KNOW that they have the very best technology.

[Virgil0211]

However the Daleks got their time travel technology in The Chase, the evidently lost it (or never had it, or didn't have it yet) for Remembrance of the Daleks, since one of the reasons they wanted the Hand of Omega was to transform a star into a suitable power source to replicate the experiments that led to Time Lord time travel technology (and didn't end of getting it, of course).  (One idea floating around is that the influence The Doctor had on long-term Dalek development in Genesis of the Daleks resulted in their being a completely different Dalek history, in which the were actually much less of a threat, mostly due to Davros, who actually kinda sucks at being an evil mastermind, having a much greater role in that history.)

Daleks have been shown using different forms of time travel (as have a few other races), all much cruder than TARDIS technology.

As far as assimilating technology in a manner like the Borg, there really don't seem to be any groups that do that, at least that have been shown.  Lots of races will scavenge technology (particularly humans), but nobody has been shown as going out and looking for technology to grab.  There are at least four races that could, but two are more interested in fighting each other than looking for other people's tech (the Sontarans and Rutans, both of whom have extremely high technology already), the Daleks (who are more interested in killing every other living thing in the universe, and have almost the best technology anyway) and the Time Lords, who are the most insular people in the known universe and already KNOW that they have the very best technology.

Thanks for both of your answers. I guess I had a thought that my idea for a Trek/Who crossover (which was primarily inspired by the idea of the Borg assimilating the tech if the Daleks and the large population of the cybermen) wouldn't necessarily require a crossover if there was a 'borg-like' antagonist already in the continuity. At the very least, I'd be willing to bet the Who writers would be able to keep the Borg effective as a threat more so than Berman and Braga. Heck, mix in a little 'best of both worlds' and doctor crossovers, you could have an excuse to bring back Eccleston as a guest star. =P

[MrBogosity]

and the Time Lords, who are the most insular people in the known universe and already KNOW that they have the very best technology.

The Time Lords weren't like that at first, when they first gained their technology. They did a LOT of pilfering from other races to get to where they were--and they used much of that technology to take other races and put them together and have them fight for their amusement. The isolationist policy didn't take place until after all of this--maybe in large part because of it--and from then they rested on their laurels, stagnating as a culture until they had all but forgotten how the technology works to begin with.